LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST...

Presenting without slides

I presented tonight at She Says's event on "2020 - imagining the future" event. And a funny thing happened. I didn't present any powerpoint slides.

I present a lot - whether it's at work or at conferences and events. And I always have powerpoints. They're pretty nice powerpoint slides to be fair - big, interesting images, not a ton of words on them but I always have them.

Today I didn't.

There's a true-true reason and a half-true reason about why I didn't have any slides.

The half true reason is that I had 10 minutes to talk to a small audience, so why should I have to have slides? As Jon Steel says more eloquently than I can in his brilliant book Perfect Pitch (read it, read it, read it!), Churchill didn't use powerpoint, Martin Luther King didn't use powerpoint, OJ Simpson's lawyer, who achieved the near-impossible, didn't use powerpoint, so why do we all? I have been doing some work recently with Mark Choueke who was a journalist and now works agency-side at Chime Communications (VCCP's holding company) Mark is a grown up and super smart and until he went agency side he never once had to write a powerpoint slide. So he had to go on powerpoint training. His view was that powerpoint seems to be the currency that the advertising/PR world trade in. How depressing.

The true true reason is that I was going to write my slides last night but the boys didn't want to go to bed and then I figured that I would write them at work, but a client meeting started late and ended late and I just didn't have the time. So although I had written my presentation I had not written any powerpoint slides. A presentation and a powerpoint deck not being the same thing obviously.

So I had no slides. Every other speaker did.

I was speaking last and as I watched the 4 speakers before me I suddenly realised that all of them had to keep stopping to click the computer in order to get to the next slide. I realised that often I was watching the screen more than I was watching them. I also realised that if your slides are in the wrong order than your story gets screwed.

So I stood up and I spoke. And I felt totally exposed, like a child without a much loved security blanket. But once I stopped worrying that the screen behind me was blank and concentrated instead purely on the audience and the story that I wanted to tell them it suddenly all made sense to me. This is the way  that we should be presenting. Unless you have a specific visual that you are referencing and want to share.Why do we always default to powerpoint??

My new resolution is to get myself out of my powerpoint comfort zone more often now. Something that I would urge all of you to try as well.It's not as easy as it looks, but often the right thing isn't always easy.

 

 

6 months in - Eugene and Felix

One of those much cited cliches that you just don't know where the time went, but it's the absolute truth. Suddenly my baby Felix is a little boy and my sqiggling newborn is now a proper baby, I can't quite believe it. It's also amazing to see their little characters develop even at such at early age. Felix is, and always has been, enormously active,. He loves flirting, opening things, making stuff, he's always on the move and very focused. Eugene seems to be the classic second child - chilled, relaxed and mellow, happy to sit back and watch his older brother play the fool.

I'm also getting ready to go back to work, which has its ups and downs. It will be hard to leave the two little ones, but I believe that I am a better mother for having some time away from them and thinking about something other than children, makes for a more balanced extistence and more saner me I think. Happy mum, happy children.

French Children Don't Throw Food...

This book has been getting a huge amount of coverage this year - and I can see why, It's a fantastic read and really taps into a hot issue, namely the art of parenting. French Children Don't Throw Food is written by an American mother of three, Pamela Druckerman, who married a Brit and now lives in Paris. Essentially it's a humorous yet serious look at French parenting compared to British and American parenting. The catalyst for writing it was a lunch at a restaurant with her husband and then 18 month old daughter. She notes that on their table chaos reigned - salt and sugar packets were ripped open, food was picked at and then thrown on the floor and within minutes her daughter was begging to get out of the high chair and run around. It's an image known very well to me and I am sure a lot of other parents. Seated all around them however were French families with children of a similar age happily eating, sitting together and behaving themselves. What, Druckerman wondered, was their secret? What were they doing that resulted in calm, contented children who eat regular food and don't have temper tantrums?

Druckerman started to spend time interviewing mothers, doctors, journalists and teachers and she discovered that there really were marked differences in the way that French mothers approach parenting. As a recent mother of 2 I can attest to the fact that in London middle class parenting is ever so slightly mental - baby yoga, baby salsa, baby sign, baby sensory, baby booters and the list goes on. There feels like there is an enormous pressure to sign your babies and toddlers up to as many classes as possible as early as possible. It can be hard to say that actually you just want your kid to potter around a bit rather than learn Mandarin. I remember waiting in a long line of stressed out mothers at our local swimming pool at 6.45am in order to sign a 4 month old Felix to baby swim class. As I said, it's all a bit mental really.

In Paris apparently there is none  of this obsessive over-parenting. Go to any playground in Paris and you will see lots of children and mothers, but you will never see a mother climbing on the climbing frame, jumping on a trampoline or sliding with her child. Mothers stay around the edge of the playground, children play. It seems that the centre of gravity in France is less child-centric which is not to say that French mothers don't love their children or send them to music classes, dance classes, sport classes, it's just that there seems to be less neurotic worrying about it all and less strict adherence to child-rearing "gurus" like Gina Ford etc.

Druckerman talks about the fact that French children seem to spend more time just being children and learning how to deal with delayed gratification and being bored, a skill that British children with all their numerous classes seem to be losing. There's a famous experiment called the "marshmallow test" that was conducted on 4 and 5 year olds in the late 1960s. In in the experiment the children are shown a marshmallow. The experimenter says that he is going to leave the room and if the child can manage not to eat the marshmallow whilst he is out then he will be rewarded with 2 marshmallows. Only 1 in 3 children managed it. What I found interesting about the test is that there was a follow up 20 years later to see if there was a difference between how good and bad delayers were faring as teenagers. Those who were children who managed not to eat the marshmallow turned out to be better at concentrating and reasoning and did not fall apart under stress unlike the bad delayers. Because French children aren't given't everything the moment that they demand it, her assertion is that they are learning to deal with the fact that the world doesn't revolve around them which then helps them become calmer children.

It's really about finding the right balance, being authoritative without being authoritarian. Although I know that I will never bring up my two boys totally a la francaise,  French Children Don't Throw Food was still hugely interesting and there are a number of parenting tips that I have picked up and put into practise in the last week and they work!

 

A more powerful "Brand You"

I did some work with David Royston-Lee back in 2006 when I had left Naked and was trying to work out where next in terms of my career.  David really made me ask myself some tough questions and work through to some interesting answers.One of the key observations that I made is that the perfect job very rarely exists, you have to create it yourself. So when I started talking to VCCP the job of Head of Digital Strategy did not exist, I was talking to them about a regular Planning position. Toegther with VCCP we then developed a different job spec, one which answered both their business needs and my career requirements. Then after a few years the scope of my job changed again and again we developed a different role, Head of Strategy and Innovation. David was critical to my approach to managing my own career and I have passed his name onto to other colleagues over the years and have no hesitation in recommending him to anyone. David is putting on a series of workshops starting in Febuary and I wanted to highlight them:

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If you:
• Want to enhance your role within your organisation
• Need to clarify where you are going with your life
• Need to revitalise yourself or find more energy and ‘umph’
• Have lost career direction and want to find it again
• Or just want to do an ‘audit’ on ‘me’

Then these workshops are designed for you!

The 4 sessions will run over a month and are planned to run from 6.30 until 8.30pm on each Tuesday from the 7th February until the 28th, incorporating presentations, exercises plus time for discussion… and some ‘homework’ to be done between sessions!
Each participant will also be able to reach David in between meetings.

Dates and subjects are:

• 7th February – Understanding yourself - a personal audit
• 14th February – Identifying your mission – what you want to achieve
• 21st February – Exploring the world according to ‘Brand You’
• 28th February – Managing the challenges ahead - what is stopping you?

Numbers will be limited to a maximum of 12 participants to ensure everyone has the opportunity to be involved, ask questions, raise concerns and discuss the topics fully.

All for a great price of £72 (incl vat) per session (£288.00 in total)
The central London venue is:
The Royal Society of Medicine,
CUHK Room - 3rd Floor
1 Wimpole Street
London W1G 0AE

To enquire or to book, please e-mail: [email protected]
or phone David on 07966 202243

Eugene and Felix

A father friend of mine told me that one of the joys of having a second child is watching the relationship build and develop between the children. At the moment Felix is interested but is finding the whole situation of being top dog and suddenly being one of two a bit hard to deal with. He's still so little, it must be tough for them to understand.And actually new born babies aren't very interesting at the start to anyone except for their parents - it's just about crying, feeding and sleeping for the first weeks. I am looking forward to seeing how their relationship grows!

Introducing baby Eugene

3 weeks old today and bloody hell, I had no idea how tough having a newborn and a toddler would be - it's brilliant, but tough tough tough.

And this is the lovely man himself, Eugene Hector Torode Joliot. The photograph capturing one of his rare non-crying, awake moments (there aren't many of them at the moment!)

Felix is interested and as the days go by seems to be growing into his role as the big brother, giving Eugene kisses and helping me with the (frequent) nappy changes.

The thing that amazes me more so this time around is just how little he is. Even in comparison to Felix, Eugene is just so small and delicate.

Now the next thing to start preparing is our first Christmas together as a family - exciting times.

(Photos by Carla Pyke, Custard Cream Photography)

 

Back on maternity leave

Today is my last day in the office for a while as baby number 2 is due in 2 weeks time. It's been a totally different pregnancy to the first so logic would say that Felix will have a little sister, but my gut feel is that it's going to be a baby boy and our house will descend into even more brilliant testosterone fuelled mayhem.

Hoping that Felix will be an excellent older brother. So far he seems a pretty happy and uncomplicated boy who appears to like babies, let's hope so!

We're still open to any baby name ideas - it's getting the balance between not too run of the mill and not too pretentious for words!

Lessons that Adland can learn from Detroit

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post on Death and Detroit and later turned it into an article for Campaign. I took what I had written and updated it with a lot of new research into the kinds of initiatives that Mayor Dave Bing and have team have been putting in place.

I am much more optimistic than I was when I first starting researching Detroit but have only become more and more convinced that there are some serious parallels with our industry. This is a presentation that I gave to AdTech last week. I hope that it makes sense without speaker notes (it should do!) At the end I have 5 things that we could learn from Mayor Bing (who is well worth following on Twitter BTW)

The lessons Adland can learn from Detroit

 

View more presentations from Amelia Torode

Facebook - behind the scenes with Boz

I was lucky enough to spend a sizable chunk of time with Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (Facebook's Director of Product Engineering) and some the US Facebook team last week - firstly at the dinner that Nicola Mendelsohn and the IPA hosted for a small group of digi-folks and then with a larger audience at Facebook's first ever UK "Hack" day in Brick Lane. 

I don't want to get into a pro's and con's of Facebook right now,  but I did think that it was worth sharing some of the nuggets of interestingness that I learnt over those two occasions. It brought to life the Facebook ideology more clearly and made me think hard about where it's heading.

There's a lot that you should be able to throw into conversations about the social web and sounded erudite and informed :-)

FACEBOOK'S MENTALITY/PHILOSOPHY/IDEOLOGY

• "Go Fast and Break Things" - love that. Fail fast and then get back on the track to success.
• "Hacker Culture" - Boz talked a lot about this. How a "hack" is different to a brainstorming where the aim is to spew out as many ideas as possible. A hack, or hackathon, is more about "thinking differently about a problem", moving fast, accepting that not every idea is a good idea, binning the shitty ideas and getting to some kind of working prototype.
• "The journey is 1% finished" - Apparently this is stickered all over Facebook HQ. Constant improvement, constant striving for something bigger and better. Zuckerburg has a kind of professional amnesia according to Boz, so that he has the ability to wake up and look fresh and Facebook like he's never seen it before and make changes again and again and again. When a developer questioned him about the fact that Facebook APIs kept changing and they had to keep changing their approach, Boz refused to apologise and basically said that it was because they were constantly trying to make their site better and that updating APIs was simply part of that. If they weren't updating and making improvements he countered that the developer would be creating apps for another website.
• Only the paranoid survive- Great story about how Facebook worry about being the "AOL of Social Networks", essentially the "play" social network before the real social web appears. Essentially there was a point when AOL = the web and where are they now?
• One killer feature is all it takes - When Facebook launched their photo service they were faced with a host of competitors all of which could far more than their's could (printing calendars, mugs, quasi-photoshopping and retouching services), all that Facebook could do was Tag. And that one killer feature was all that it took to effectively kill off their competition.

Boz is a fascinating character (have a read on Quora on how he got offered a job at Facebook) and Facebook a company that is utterly redefining our experience and expectation of the web.  It falls to us all to really try to understand what drives the Facebook movers and shakers and their philosophy of open connectivity that is having such a profound impact on 750 million of us.

Thoughts?

Summer reading suggestions

In this week's Campaign there were a number of reading suggestions from the great and the good of Adland. Since the birth of Felix I haven't read much but in the past few weeks have suddenly got back into reading in a big way so thought that I would share some of my recommendations:

WORK: High Brow - The Filter Bubble by Eli Parisher

Usually I have to confess that I tend to think that "work-y" books (Black Swan, We First etc) should have have stayed a long article as opposed to be pulled out and out and out until they make a book. Not this one. Its bloody brilliant and covers so many more themes than the blurb alludes to. I had never thought about the downside to personalization and his investigation into creativity and innovation was sparkling. Huge, thought-provoking recommendation.

WORK: Low Brow - How To Leave Twitter by Grace Dent

Ok, so to appreciate this you have to be active on Twitter otherwise its going to seem like the most self-indulgant nonsense (and at times it verges dangerously close to it I have to say) but on the whole its the funniest, bitchiest investigation into what drives Twitter useage and addiction. Great fun.

NON-WORK: Fiction - Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

I loved this book. Its a cross between season 4 of The Wire and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Harriet The Spy and wow, does it stay with you! Loosely based on a real incident or an amalgamation of a number of incidents in Peckham and similar type London urban areas, its the story of an 11 year old boy and his world. It made me want to join a book club so that I could talk about it with other people, so if you read it and find it as moving as I did and want to talk just drop me an email. Just wonderful and utterly eye-opening.

NON-WORK: Non Fiction - Sister Queens by Julia Fox

I studied History at university and really enjoy finding out about areas of history that I know nothing about and this period in English and European history was one of them. Its a book about two Spanish sisters, daughters of Ferdinand and Isabella, Katherine of Aragon and Juana of Castile, mapping their lives from birth to their respective deaths. Its a story of politics, deception, religion and family. Totally gripping.

In Praise of Jeremy Bullmore (and the WPP Marketing Fellowship)

Many many years ago when I was a naive young thing sitting in my ivory tower at university I found a copy of Campaign in our careers service library. I had been thinking about brands and brand image standing, as you do as a student, in a queue at the supermarket. I had been looking at people's baskets and was trying to work out what kinds of people I thought that they were without looking up at them! It sounds like an odd game to play, but it was eye opening to me in terms of the power of brands.

On the front page of Campaign was an article by Martin Sorrell talking about how ad agencies were losing the war for smart young graduates - who he said were choosing better paid careers in banking and management consultancies rather than advertising. So I wrote him a letter and told him to put his money where his mouth was and give me a placement at WPP. To cut a long story short, I didn't get a placement but I did get a job.

I was in the second year of the WPP Marketing Fellows in 1997. And I was enormously lucky to have Jeremy Bullmore allocated to me as my mentor for the 3 years of the Fellowship. Since graduating from the Fellowship Jeremy has become a proper friend and essential confidante.

I was asked to say a few words at the Advertising Assocation dinner in his honour last week as he recieved the Mackintosh Medal. I thought that I would share with you the speech that I wrote and the advice that JB has given myself and other Fellows over the years.

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I think that I’ve got a pretty raw deal here tonight if I am honest with you.

Firstly I’ve got to talk about a subject that everyone in the room knows about.

In fact many of you have probably known Jeremy for longer than I have done, so you probably know more about the subject than I do.

Added to that, I’ve got to stand up after a talking heads video by the great and the good from around the world. Some of the most eloquent speakers you are ever likely to hear.  So any attempt at erudite humour, or sparkling wit is going to sound a bit turgid in comparison.

Finally Martin who spoke directly before me was the person who hired me out of university - my first boss. Absolutely no pressure then.

So I won’t tell any of you about Jeremy’s enormous generosity of time and spirit. I won’t tell any of you about his modesty or his insight or his razor-sharp wit. And I wouldn’t dream of telling you about his kindness and thoughtfulness because - (a) you all know about that already and (b) I am in danger of making him out to be as sickly as the Werthers Original grandfather from the adverts, which as you all know couldn’t be further from the truth.

I wanted to share three quick stories with you tonight which I think sum up some of the best Jeremy Bullmore career advice he has given myself and other WPP Fellows over the years

I think that many of us here tonight consider Jeremy to be an un-official kind of mentor. I was lucky enough to be allocated Jeremy as an official mentor when I was awarded a WPP Fellowship back in 1997. Over the years Jeremy has helped me to understand and navigate this fabulous and sometimes tricky world and in the process has become what I hope is a genuine friend, although I am constantly reminded of my place in life’s hierarchy as I am known in Farm Street as “Amelia 2” (“Amelia 1” being his hugely talented daughter)

It was in my first year of the Fellowship that I became fascinated by this thing called the internet and it was thanks to Jeremy that this fascination began. “Just find something that you do that no-one else knows who” JB had advised me during one of our early mentor sessions. So I looked around at the folks at 40 Berkeley Sqaure and I “taught myself” the web as the only other people who seemed interested was the IT department. Coming up to the end of my year at JWT I  was again with Jeremy to try and work out where to go to next to learn more about this new area. I was full of questions to ask him - which agenices, which countries, which people? Having listened to my digital babbling, JB remarked: “You’ve always got me here for advice, but just remember that no-one cares about your own career as much as you do.” I remember feeling a bit put out, as though it was a kind of rebuke but it was actually the best careers advice I had ever been given. The knowledge that actually the only person who has control over your own professional destiny is yourself was a great wake up call.

The second piece of advice that has stuck was actually to another Fellow, but its advice that I have since taken to heart. The Fellow in question had recently graduated from the Fellowship and was looking for some guidance from Jeremy. She outlined a number of big sounding job offers that she had on the table and asked for his opinion. JB listened quietely and then gave the following advice: “When faced with a number of different opportunities always take the one that is most terrifying. At the very least you’ll learn what humility tastes like.”

Finally a tale told to me by a Fellow here tonight: “Early on I went on one of those university milk round WPP presentations, it was Oxford I think. JB came along. All the Fellows, in our varying degrees of cockiness, were intending to busk our parts of the presentation. Jeremy however came with a typed speech that he had written specifically for the occasion. As respectful of the undergraduate audience as he would have been a room full of CEOs. He delivered it in his own quiet way, and there was compete silence in the room as everyone leaned forward to listen. It was a lovely example of JB being “humile” - even though of all people, he needn’t be.”

So three lessons for professional development - self reliance, bravery and humility. Three pretty good rules to live by I think.

It’s a huge thank you from myself, your mentees here tonight and all the others around the world who couldn’t be here tonight. Between all of us you have forced your way through countless bottles of white wine and fish and chip lunches. The impact on your cholesterol must have been dreadful. The impact on all of our careers profound. And for that I just want to say thank you again.

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The WPP Fellowship was a fantastic experience for me and totally shaped my career. I wouldn't hesitate ot recommend it to any graduates out there looking for their first job in the industry! There would be no way that at such an early stage in a career that you would have access to people like Jeremy, Jon Steel and Martin. It really is brilliant.

And if you haven't read everything that Jeremy has ever written (then shame on you!), here is a list of them all.

 

Nicola Mendelsohn, new IPA President

I went to the IPA lunch this week at which Nicola Mendelsohn talked through her vision and agenda for her tenure as IPA President. I thought that it was great!

Delighted to that the IPA has appointed its first woman president, delighted that the IPA has appointed its first working mother president but most of all I'm just delighted that the IPA has appointed someone with a practical and inspiring vision for our to re-boot the advertising community in the UK and make it more technologically enabled and creatively pioneering and curious.

This is a transcript of her speech - and this is the visual transciption of it.

Her agenda covered three main points:

1.    Developing better skills
Through partnership with others and building new programmes around new ways of researching multiplatform content, and building better understanding of the interplay between technology and behaviour. The IPA to be an innovation hub as well as an institute.

2.    Creating better connections in adjacent creative industries

3.    Re-energising the industry with fresh talent
By attracting a new mix of graduates, attracting new advertising talent (for example from those who want a mid-career change), and developing new craft skills.

And talked about four new IPA partnerships and collaborations:

•    PACT (the UK’s independent TV and Film Production association), and UKIE (representing gaming and content providers) to improve collaboration between members and help develop joint approaches to IP.

•     Google to provide funding to invest in a Hyper Island programme for future digital champions. Facilitated by Skillset, who will source 100 graduates from 100 universities to provide a new talent pool.

•    BBC Academy to train the industry in multiplatform technology. A first for the ad industry that will take TV production departments, media and crea-tive teams to a new level.

•    Facebook - to showcase Facebook Studio Live in the UK and provide training for agencies, as well as sponsoring a new special prize within the IPA Effectiveness Awards.

Is Adland the new Detroit?

I have been thinking quite a bit about Detroit since Guardian journalist (and ex neighbour of mine when I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn) Gary Younge posted a Facebook link about the breath-takingingly beautiful and unbelievably sad photographs of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

I had never really thought of Detroit being a beautiful city but the photographs prompted me to look into the history of the city. Detroit was once the 4th largest city in the US, a emblem of American power, industry and commerce - hugely profitable, hugely powerful. And today, a city shell.

How did it happen? This was a city designed around one industry - the automotive industry. One industry with one set way of working - one end product, a linear production line and factories that got bigger and bigger and bigger. Technology flattened the world, consumer demand changed but the US motor companies fiddled around the edges of their industry without seemingly comprehending the magnitude of change. There's an apocryphal story of one of the motor execs going to DC to ask for money for a bail out. He travelled there on his private Lear jet and was then driven from the airport in an enormous stretch-limo  and then couldn't understand why his pleas to help save his industry were falling on incredulous ears. They just did not get it.

Could Adland be the new Detroit? Big, bloated and top-heavy with a lack of real innovation baked in?

There's an article in the Huffington Post in which John Kao says :

The city needs a strategy, it needs a vision of how it can turn itself into a 21st century city, attractive to talent, with a critical mass of R&D and a revitalized approach to education, fresh thinking. It needs to go for the brass ring — incremental innovation will not save it — nor will the four casinos and other tourist amenities that have been put in to make the city a tourist destination. Only a fresh re-thinking of the strategy, the sources of future wealth and the willingness to make the investment of time, treasury and effort will see the city through.

So applicable to our industry.

One of the photographs that I have highlighted here is the Vanity Ballroom in downtown Detroit, such an apt name. As an industry we have to stop re-arranging the chairs in our Vanity Ballroom and start planning for fundamental and profound changes in  communications landscape and in consumer demand.

Oh and buy the book on Amazon, it is wonderful.

What Twitter means

There's a good article in this week's Observer about Twitter by Gaby Hinscliff. She spoke to a number of people who used it and asked what Twitter means to them:

Ian Rankin (@Beathhigh)

I work from home and work on my own. Twitter connects me to the outside world, and makes it feel as though I'm in a huge, airy office full of funny, well-informed people. It gives me instant news, clever jokes, views, and reactions. Fans of my books can contact me, and I can let them know what I'm up to.

Twitter is also my diary. I can scroll back through my tweets and recall what I was up to on any particular day. I keep in touch with friends, make new ones, renew old acquaintances, and sometimes am even gifted ideas for stories. All from my office chair, in 140 characters (which also makes it a fantastic daily exercise in editing and concision).

Ian Rankin is an author and the creator of the Rebus crime novels

Tracey Thorn (@tracey_thorn)

Twitter is where I go for jokes and sympathy. It's hard to be humorous in song lyrics. When you write a song, you want it to be listened to over and over again, and funny lyrics very soon become extremely irritating. So Twitter is an outlet for the frivolous, the irreverent, the throwaway comment. It's also a good place to share arcane bits of information.

It's not so good for expressing serious opinions. Twitter is at its most annoying when everyone gets up on their high horse about something. But it appeals to the economist in me. It imposes rules and sets limits, which I like. Use fewer words. Use shorter words. Get to the point. And try to be funny.

Tracey Thorn is one half of the band Everything But the Girl

Jemima Khan (@JemimaGoldsmith)

I dipped a toe in. It seemed like a place that gave monomaniacs a tannoy: so little space to say so little, Facebook for an older wastrel. I loitered, tweetless. I acquired 15 patient followers. I felt forced onto the stage with a mic and no speech.

That was a year ago. Now, I'm a promiscuous twitterer. I use Twitter for up-to-the minute news, for aphorisms, jokes and links to obscure and interesting articles. I use it for charity as well as inanity. I use it to reply to Glenda Slaggs. I use it as a very resourceful directory. I use it as a friend to whom I can say "that's bollocks" when there's no one else around. Twitter never sleeps. It has revolutionised the way I procrastinate.

Jemima Khan is a writer and campaigner

Victoria Coren (@VictoriaCoren)

I use Twitter in its most basic function: as an antidote to loneliness. I don't think you're supposed to admit that, if you're on TV sometimes and have a lot of followers. But if I claimed I use it purely to promote my work, or practise the art of the polished one-line joke, I'd be lying. I use it just as the most cynical anti-Twitter ranter imagines: to see who's eating toast or who's got a cold, and to feel part of a community. No shame in that. It's fun. If you fancy watching an election debate with 100,000 people, doing it this way saves a lot of trips to Tesco. The connections are brief but real. They're a bonus to life, not an alternative. We're all passing through this valley; why not smile at fellow travellers on the way?

Victoria Coren is an author, poker player and Observer columnist

Ory Okolloh (@kenyanpundit)

I don't have time to catch up on the various blogs, newspapers, TV stations, etc that I'd like to track, so I use Twitter quite a bit as a news curator of sorts – and love the way I can regularly stumble on something I ordinarily wouldn't. I also find it a good source of "cocktail hour" material that makes me sound smarter than I am. A surprise use: I have found it to be a fantastic way to network and make connections in person, especially when I travel. I tweet in the same way I used to blog: sharing thoughts mainly about Kenya, Africa and tech. Finally, I confess I use it a lot to procrastinate and escape my always overwhelming inbox.

Ory Okolloh is Google's Africa policy manager, and the co-founder of crisis-mapping site Ushahidi.com and political site Mzalendo.com

People still ask me to explain what it is about Twitter that I find so unrelentlessly fascinating, useful and entertaining. I might just forward them these explanations as they sum it up brilliantly.

• Twitter is my version of an RSS feed full of news and stats, jokes and ideas.
• Twitter is my lifeline out of a sea of boredem when I am stuck on public transport.
• Twitter is my cyber Solomon.

The thing with Twitter like all technology you have to use it in order to genuinely understand it. And using it doesn't mean simply setting up a profile and then waiting for a cascade of brilliance to fall onto your screen because it won't. Using it means finding, following, engaging, responding, building a community and being part of a community.

Twitter is utterly invaluble to me.

How to succeed in being a working mum (TED Women)

I found this video by Sheryl Sandberg at Ad Broad and it really resonated for obvious reasons.

I am now three weeks into being a working mum and despite loving my time on maternity it's actually great to be back at work. Great to be sharpening my brain and ordering my thinking, but also great to be able to read an article, send an email and think -  or just share a coffee and have a gossip with friends without a tiny hand constantly trying to pull at my leg or bash at the keyboard or in fact trying to eat the keyboard. There have been a few days when I have left the house and he's asleep and I get home and he's asleep and that's hard but I know for me at this moment in time I don't want to be a full-time mum, so getting that balance of baby and work is hugely important to me (though I certainly raise my hat to those women who do - hardest job in the world!) I am sure that on the days and the times that I am with Felix I am a better, more attentive mum and the times that I am at VCCP I work so much harder than I have ever done before as I really want/need to get home while the little one is awake.

So this video connected and as I hadn't seen it before thought it was a good one to share.

 

I think her insight into the way in which women and men operate in the workforce is spot on and her analysis of whether women can be successful and well-liked is fascinating (albeit depressing) Her advice about how to succeed at being a working mum is to be make sure that the job that you are in is rewarding, challenging, interesting before you even think about having kids otherwise it's pretty tough to go back and leave your little one! I think that she's right. Many years ago my mentor at WPP told me over a fish and chip lunch to remember that "no-one will care about your career as much as you do." That was great advice, tough but bang on. No-one does care as much as you do. Why should they? It's your job, your career, your life. Remembering that has always helped me think about the roles that I want to play at the places where I work.

Hope that this video is useful or interesting to women (and men) thinking about combining parenthood with a career.

"future of advertising" is utterly depressing

I went along to the IPA's 44 Club this evening to hear a talk on A Glimpse Into Advertising in 2020. The write up sounded fascinating:

• What will agencies look like in 2020? Consolidated, function or category specialised, and how many agencies should a client need to hire etc
• What will the average ad-mans day consist of? In home vs in office. Science vs Magic?
• How will social trends affect the way we work in 2020? Will there be older people, more women or greater flexibility in the industry?
• What role for the 30” ad? Is traditional TV doomed?
• Who will be the most influential man in the room?
• Where should we be focused on now if we want to make ourselves indispensable in 2020? Essential skills vs core disciplines

Maybe my expectations were too high, but the IPA is so often the platform for really smart debate and inspirational speakers. I was looking for sparks, controversy, a challenge. I wanted to be inspired and scared and excited, in the way that I felt after reading Danielle Sack's brilliant Fast Company article "Mayhem on Madison Avenue." But instead I came away feeling rather flat and a bit depressed.

Tom Morton the new Chief Strategy Officer at Publicis (who I work with on the IPA Strategy Group) did a great job at trying to articulate and frame the debate and as well as talking about one of my favourite books (Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities), coined a memorable moniker for building change and innovation into agencies - HELP. Hack, Experiment, Learn, Punt. Graham Fink said that nothing had really changed in advertising apart from the fact that there was a lot more fear in agencies and that all we need is a table to sit around in order to talk to each other. Not sure if I totally agree but I get his point about the power of ideas to connect and tap into basic, un-changing human emotions. And I get his point about the table (although it's 2011 and I can't really believe that we are still talking about moving "digital" up from the agency basement to sit together with the rest of agency) Tina Fegent talked about procurement and how agencies needed to think more creatively about their approach to procurement. Again which I totally understand and agree with.

So why did I come away feeling depressed? I think that I felt that the really big issues weren't properly addressed.  It felt a bit like we werre all fiddling around the edges while missing some of the massive issues staring us all in the face. I agree with Tom that there's little point in trying to predict the future as you only end up looking like a bit of tit when you're proved wrong. So from that starting point, here are some questions that I am starting to think about at VCCP:

As channels proliferate and skill-sets deepen and diverge, it is going to be impossible for an agency to effectively "own" all the skills that they need to service clients. Given that, how do we start to build a loose network of partners, developers and producers who can work along side the core agency hub? I am increasingly thinking of it as an "...and Friends" model, based on the insight that you choose your friends and not your family (I hate the expression Sister Agency, so many sisters I know seem to hate each other - but that's an aside) 

As real-time truly kicks in we need to find new and smarter ways of charging for time and ideas. Yes, payment by results but the truly integrated campaigns are so tightly intertwined and aligned, how will we be able to tell which part of the campaign truly accounted for what % revenue growth. How do we charge and how do we staff continuous participative conversation-driven campaigns?

How do we ensure that the art of story-telling is not lost? It's all well and good to know your Quora from your Qwiki but how do we combine technology and narrative in a way that truly connects on an emotional level? Have we lost the skill of wrapping a story around an idea?

Thinking about always-on campaigns, how do we work together better with the likes of sciptwriters and games developers and political campaign agencies? I can see what's in it for us, what's in it for them?

Where does crowdsourcing fit? Does it fit?

 It seems to be that its a question of innovation - harnessing the power of adaptability. Evolve or die.

It's going to take enormous energy to try and attempt to find new and looser ways of working. It's a new business model that no-one has really cracked yet.

I think that the future of advertising is about these 5 things:

1. Smaller units
2. Madder people
3. People who don't know (or dare I say, care) about Snow Plough or Saatchi & Saatchi in the 80s
4. People who can find stories in numbers
5. People who don't work in the office

I wish that we could have debated some of those areas.

Any thoughts on "the future of advertising" happy to hear them!

Felix at 8 months

When I start back at VCCP in January normal service will resume on this blog but at the moment my days (and nights) are totally taken up with this little one who is developing and growing up so fast!

It has been amaing to watch him every day learning more, understanding more and doing more.

Who knows if this is just me projecting how I would like him to turn out but he seems a remarkably chilled baby happy to be passed from person to person, or sitting calmly playing next to me while I try and do some grown up work meetings. He has a great sense of fun, a wicked smile when he knows something is silly and is pleasure to hang out with.

Why I am still on maternity leave

A couple of people have commented that they were surprised that I was "still on maternity leave"

I have realised how lucky we are in the UK to have such family-friendly maternity policies when my French and American friends talk about going back to work at 12 weeks as if that was the norm.

Before I went off on maternity I did wonder whether I'd get bored and how soon I'd come running back to VCCP. I thought maybe 6 months at the most and then work would be too much of a draw.

The reality is a bit different.

Felix is 5 months now and has turned into this brilliantly funny little baby full of life, energy and smiles and although I am exhausted I can't imagine being back in the office full-time in 4 weeks (they do know this btw!)

Through Twitter I feel plugged in and connected to the advertising - digital - comms community that I am a part of so although motherhood is all consuming at the moment I don't feel cut off. This has to be a fairly new phenomena - the way that social platforms enable non-working mothers to stay in the loop professionally.

So I will be coming back to work but I am discussing a 4 day week and a change in my role so that there are less mental late nights (although I am aware that these are always going to exist in our industry) and meetings outside of London. Because as well as loving my son I also happen to love my job and the industry that I am lucky enough to be in so I am going to have to try and work out how to try and harmonise the two.

I think that I will probably attempt to come back to work around the 9 month mark. My next project is to find a loving french-speaking nanny to look after the little one.

Anyone have any ideas?

He's a charmer and a lot of fun to hang out with!

When is a sofa not a sofa?

This is my chocolate brown leather sofa

Or to be more precise this WAS my chocolate brown leather sofa. I sold it last week to a lovely family who love round the corner from me. It was a heart-wrenching moment for me because in so many ways that was more than just a sofa.

I got it when I was living in New York. It was 2003 and I had just broken up with my then boyfriend and was moving out of Brooklyn into my own apartment in the Lower East Side. It was the first time that I was living alone, in my own space and it really felt like a growing up phase. I also had a considerable lack of furniture so this sofa was the first thing that I purchased.

The sofa became symbolic of the new me.  I really loved it. It was 7 feet long and I have no idea how they moved it in and out of my 5th floor walk-up or to the flat in Marylebone or to the house in East Dulwich but somehow it always traveled with me.

And it was just too big for our front room. And the colour was just too dark for our front room. So we sold it.

Why am I even sharing this story? Well I guess for a start this blog is meant to be about things that are important to me and the sofa and what it stood for was but also professionally I keep seeing ads for DFS and Sofa Warehouse where all they stress is the price of the sofa. I think that they're missing a trick because although price is important the symbolic value of furniture and the memories that they represent are not only more interesting than price but also potentially a stronger lure and I have never seen any ad campaigns for sofa companies tap into the insight, so room for differentiation.

Frank's Cafe & Campari Bar - Peckham

Last year Frank Boxer, Paloma Gormley, Lettice Drake and Hannah Barry Gallery joined forces to create a pop-up art/food experience that was my favourite of the summer. They took over the roof top and top floor of the rather skanky Peckham multi-storey car park and created a sculpture exhibition and a restaurant on the roof.

(Pix from AR - hope that's ok! www.arplus.com/5176/franks-cafe-peckham-london-by-paloma-gormley-and-lettice-drake)

It opens up again on the 2nd July and I'd really recommend checking it out. It's opposite Peckham Rye train station (12 mins from Victoria, London Bridge or Blackfriars) and open Thursday through Saturday until the end of the summer.

The menu is good though limited given the nature of the space. The atmosphere can be a bit too trendy for its own good at times but its a big enough space for it never to feel crowded and the views at sunset are just wonderful.

This is the official website with all the details.